Trials in Latvia Bring Painful Past Into the Present

Washington Post, Wednesday 2 October 2002; Page
A11

Deportation of Thousands Under Stalin Remains a Divisive Issue in
Baltic Nation

RIGA, Latvia—In the decade since Latvia became independent, the
headlines often have trumpeted what would be considered old news in
other countries. Lately, 1949 has become a hot topic again as Latvians
debate the actions of Nikolai Larionov.

The 81-year-old retiree, a one-time agent of the Soviet secret police,
is on trial for genocide, accused by Latvian prosecutors of helping
organize the 1949 deportation of more than 500 Latvians to
Siberia. Many were women and children. More than 60 died.

Larionov's case is the most recent in a string of such
prosecutions since the Soviet Union's collapse allowed Latvia and
the two other Baltic countries, Lithuania and Estonia, to regain the
freedom lost during World War II. In recent years, nothing has proved
more divisive than such trials in a country where rifts run deep
between those who suffered under Joseph Stalin's regime and those
who participated in it.

In a place where the ghosts of the 20th century still loom large in
the 21st, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 is mentioned in
interviews almost as frequently as the latest economic indicators, and
no political issue has as much resonance today as what happened in
1949. Across the three Baltic countries, the memory of the 140,000
families Stalin deported to Siberia during and after World War II has
been zealously resurrected.

“Of course it's relevant,” said Larionov's
attorney, Alexander Ogurtsovs. “Even today, almost every family
in Latvia was repressed in some way. It's hard to find anyone here
whose relatives weren’t connected with repression or
repressed.”

The Latvian government takes the position that it is not prosecuting
the Soviet system, just going after individuals accused of wrongdoing,
such as Larionov.

“This is not about collective responsibility, this is about
individuals,” said State Secretary Maris Riekstins, the top
professional diplomat in the Latvian Foreign Ministry. “This is
not about collective responsibility of Russians as a nation.”

But for Russia, and the more than 700,000 ethnic Russians still living
here, it's pure revenge.

In Moscow, hardly a week goes by without the Foreign Ministry
denouncing Latvia for cases like Larionov's, while here in the
Latvian capital, ethnic Russians see an effort to score political
advantage.

“We should have long ago put a full stop to this historical
settling of accounts and look to the future,” said Ksenia
Zagorovska, editor in chief of Chas, a Russian-language daily. Like
other Russians here, she believes such trials are a matter of
politics. “It's a useful thing for those parties who are
interested in fanning disputes between ethnic communities,” she
said.

Top Russian officials reinforce that idea.

Larionov's trial is a “psychological persecution” of
“an elderly, sick man,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman
Boris Malakhov recently. In pursuing Larionov, “the Latvian
judicial system is once again demonstrating to the whole civilized
world its disregard for the principles of universal international
documents,” he added, according to the Interfax news agency.

Latvians should be doing less to go after Soviet-era crimes and more
to address their own history of collaborating with Nazi Germany,
Malakhov continued. “If Latvia is truly interested in building
an image of a democratic country and a good neighbor with Russia,
instead of squaring accounts with fighters against fascism, its
authorities should seriously get down to business and look for former
Nazi criminals.”

Listening to such statements, Latvian officials like Riekstins see a
rear-guard effort to needle, pester and generally annoy a former
colony the Russians can no longer subjugate. The Latvians point out
that it was only in the late 1980s, as the Baltic independence
movement was gaining steam, that the Kremlin belatedly announced it
had discovered the existence of the secret Molotov-Ribbentrop pact,
which divided Europe between Hitler and Stalin and placed the three
Baltic countries squarely in Stalin's territory.

Officially, as Riekstins noted recently, the Russian Foreign Ministry
considers the absorption of Latvia into the Soviet Union a matter of
free will, citing the “invitation” from the
Soviet-installed puppet government, while the Latvian government calls
it an “illegal occupation.”

Russia, he and others noted, is never interested in discussing
deportations like those being prosecuted in the Larionov case. In its
own post-Soviet decade, Russia has not gone through a legal process of
accounting for the crimes of the Stalin era. There has never been a
Nuremberg-type prosecution of those responsible for the labor camps
and the mass killings, and most Russians say they prefer to look ahead
rather than back at the murders of a previous government.

Latvia has its share of current concerns to tackle: dismal Soviet-era
hospitals; poor rural areas untouched by a decade of the Baltic
“economic miracle” so evident in this prosperous capital;
corruption so rampant that Transparency International, which monitors
the problem, recently ranked Latvia as the second-most corrupt country
of those hoping to join the European Union.

But here and in the other Baltic states, the arguments over history
continue. In the Larionov case, which was scheduled to resume
yesterday in a courtroom just outside Riga after lengthy delays caused
by the defendant's health, Latvian prosecutors are litigating anew
one of the most painful episodes of their Soviet past: the mass
deportations, starting on March 25, 1949, that took place as part of
Stalin's order to forcibly impose collectivization of agriculture
on the Baltics.

Altogether, 42,133 people were deported from Latvia, accused of being
kulaks, or rich peasants, along with thousands more from the other
Baltic countries. In total, 94,799 people from the Baltics were sent
to labor camps in Siberia in just a few days.

Larionov, an officer in the State Security Ministry at the time,
allegedly was responsible for 500 of the deportations. He does not
deny taking part in what Russians still call the
“repressions.” The issue for him and his legal team is
whether he should now be held accountable for following orders—a
debate familiar from decades of Nazi war crimes trials.

“It's a mistake to prosecute him,” said his attorney,
Ogurtsovs. “The whole system participated. They shouldn’t
hold responsible only those people at low levels. This is wrong. A
typist might have had a stronger impact on somebody's life than
these people.”

Talk about the Larionov case quickly turns to a detailed discussion of
Communist bureaucratic practices. The recounting serves as a reminder
of how huge an apparatus participated in the massive gulag prison
system, which sent millions of Soviet citizens to their deaths.

As a bureaucrat in the secret police, Ogurtsovs argued, Larionov came
into the deportation process long after it had been ordained. He was
handed a list with 500 names on it, his attorney said, and told to
check each one to determine whether the individual belonged on
it. People were removed from the list only if it could be proved that
they had served in the Red Army or had been decorated by the Soviet
Union.

“He did not make decisions, with the exception of one
thing—to decide whether a person had reasons for not being
deported,” Ogurtsovs said. “Clearly, he indirectly
participated in it, but his participation was less than the driver of
the truck or train that took them away, for example.”

For Ogurtsovs, an ethnic Latvian who has represented a long list of
accused Stalin-era killers in the decade since Latvian independence,
the matter seems clear. “I’m Latvian, but our nation has
got its negative sides, especially vengefulness,” he said. In
this trial, he said, and all the others, “the goal is to make
enemies out of those who used to be heroes.”